Greg Edwards, Chief Technical Officer, for Eyetools, Inc., has launched a fascinating new blog that discusses his work in analyzing how readers interact with blog sites.
Here’s a heatmap of someone reading one of their blogs…
From Greg Edwards of the Eyetools blog:
“Eyetools testing showed that the original “Navigation Bar” blog wasn’t written as well as I’d thought… here’s what I found, and what I did about it.
This is what happens when you have easy access to eyetracking testing: you start wondering how well you’re doing writing about it… and after wondering very briefly, you test it and find that it needs improvement. Alas.
Our first blog: All that red at the top shows that everyone reads our title and the first 1-line paragraph, but that they start dropping off in the middle of the “story” paragraph (guess the writing wasn’t as good as I thought :-).
The “statistics” section held good information, but only 60% of people read it. Can I do better?
And the “punch line” certainly is getting wasted down there (50% and mostly skimming). No big surprise. Shouldn’t have been so egotistical to believe that I could actually hold people’s attention ALL the way to the end, but that final point was important, so I’m moving it.
so, I’m going to tweak the text of the original blog and post it as a new one. I’ve still got a bunch of people who will be coming through for this study so I’ll test that as well! Crossing fingers… I’m going to go write the new version now…
Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.
He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.
